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ALEXANDERANDTHEANCHOR

History as a branch of academic research is the most spiritually liberating among the social sciences . It gives us a sense of belonging as we find ourselves interlinked not only to others around us but also to millions or even billions of men and women who came before us . The many versions of Indian History that have developed over the years still makes it a contentious subject , which is to be treated with care . There are the historians who adhere to the far left , others who are slightly left of the center and there is the right, sadly there have never been an attempt to develop a neutral , all encompassing path called the middle as far as Indian History is concerned . The problem with not having a neutral view point is the inability of the various competing stands to accommodate opposing views , making them stick to their initial versions , even though new findings might have proved the contrary .Lets take an example , From the primary school level we were taught the tale of the great battle that took place in the northwest frontier province , between an Indian prince – porous and the great Greek conqueror Alexander , Usually taught as a story of true morality , valor and friendship it got etched into our psyche . It will be many years before we understand the fact that the narration was purely European with no significant inputs , even porus the name of the Indian prince is the Greek version of Purushottama . The other startling fact is the significance of the above mentioned battle itself , not a single Indian source validates the war , almost all of them don’t even mention Alexander ( though Yavanas are mentioned a few times ) . Ironically , the war which Indian’s never remember happen have over the years become the anchor point in deciphering Indian history. The year 326 B C is considered as the only authentic point in the long history of nearly 2 billion people from where the history could be interpreted both forward and backward corresponding to the western history , the Indian sources are brushed aside as fanciful exaggerations of some lunatic monks while equally mad rumblings of homer are celebrated . Though this was another of the many propaganda wars employed by the British to authenticate their paternalistic rule , it still remains 70 years since independence .it is high time that we rewrite our history based on modern scientific approaches , so that it will become our history , not their interpretation of our follies.

iOur history starts with modern human beings settling here nearly 35,000 years back . Evidences denote to them coming from the west , may be from central Asia or the Mediterranean . They first settled down in Baluchistan , and over the span of thousands of years they moved east and south , building stone age civilizations . The forested plains of the Indus and its parallel river named t”saraswati” became the the first center of civilization in the subcontinent . Saraswati during its youth was a mammoth river that flowed parallel to Indus from Himalayas to the Rann off kutch through what is now the Thar desert . It was fed by both yamuna and satluj making it the main trading route over the western plains ,This is what is now called the Indus – Saraswati civilisation , which is known for its first of its kind urban centers . Though most of the urban centers were on the bed of the dried sarasawati river , it took historians 100 years to accept its existence , this would not have been the case if the Indian records were ever considered as sources from Vedas to the great epic Mahabharata describes the river in all its glory . Before the satellite images showed the river tract in detail , western Historians and many in the far left dismissed the river as an imagination similar to the famed soma of the Vedas . They even tried to find rivers in central Asia and Afghanistan which were supposed to be the Aryan homeland . But with advancement in science and technology saraswati was reborn . The Aryan invasion theory is the next stumbling block , though genetic studies have shown a closer relation between the people of North and South India than with North Indians and people of central Asia , more research needs to be done in this field , that too without biases

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With the drying up of saraswati , the inhabitants of the cities and villages around it might have slowly abandoned them with a large part of them migrating to the ganga valley , the sudden surge in population in peninsular India and the gangatic plains right after the collapse of Indus cities corroborates this point. People re established their lost civilization in their new homelands and India was reborn , now with a wider geographical distribution and the ganga valley became its epicenter . This brings us back to the question of 326 BC. The name “sandrakkottos ” is the villain here , which is translated by historians as chandragupta . As we know there are two chandraguptas who are prominent figures in the Indian history , one being a maurya and the other the Guptan king , both being the sovereigns when yavanas and mlecchas were on the ascend . Though sandrakkottos is now widely accepted as chandragupta maurya , many Indian records still leave it ambiguous .this is a span of nearly 500 years ,if we analyze the period after the conquest and if sandrakkottos is taken as maurya , the history since then looks cramped with many dynasties overlapping each other , but if it was the gupta king it would loosen to a great extend . if true these assumptions could move the Indian history back by a few hundred years . The post mauryan history of India is so cramped with dynasties that the Hindu revival seems to have started just before the arrival of Muslim invaders . It is a known fact that a society in flux is the prime ground for new ideologies to thrive , Islam was never embraced on a wider scale and strangely the neo Hindus kept on fighting for over a millennia , which when compared to similar societies like Iran is extraordinary. the description of the period between 5th and 9th century AD is illogical on many counts . one of the examples being the narration of the chola conquer of the gangetic plains , which appears true but cannot be accomodated in the current scenario. Pushing aside the Indian version of Indian history over time have proved fatal , Now it is time for us to recreate our history with no biases or political leanings away from Alexander’s anchor.